The Hounds' Gate
by awilla the hun
Summary: For some days, a good friend of mine has left me a house. She has not told me where she has gone. There is absolultely nothing wrong with it. There are absolutely no hounds at Hounds Gate. There is absolutely no magic in this world.
1. Chapter 1

_There is, in a city not unlike your own, a place called Hound's Gate._

_It is near a castle, where men once laughed and fought and hanged._

_It is of red brick, and black window frames, giving it the appearance of a diseased mouth. People work there in front of computers, ostensibly for a respectable estate agent._

_There is nothing unusual there._

_The wind has never whistled through it like a God whispering to himself._

_The manholes have never rattled and lept as traffic growls and snarls past-just a whisker's width, but still perceptibly, audibly, wrongly, for anyone of vision._

_A girl, who lived close by for a time, did not disappear._

_It does not have deep roots, roots of unimaginable depth and age._

_I know nothing about it…._


	2. Chapter 2

I put this here, because here I have no name. This is, I think, for the best. Here, I can flicker through identities like a thief through an empty jewellers'. Here, I can remain hidden, and tell others of my plight, like a hound marking out its territory. Here, in a forum of the fantastical, I can be believed.

Here, I can tell of- everything.

Let's start with a young woman. The one who set everything into motion.

The name I give her here is Jorrocks. It is not her real name. She would probably take exception, in no uncertain terms, at me giving it to her. The real Jorrocks was a British general in the Second World War. He was, in his time, an Olympian, a man of action, but now stares out of his photos in black and white and immobility. He frowns slightly.

The Jorrocks I knew frowned, too. It was only ever briefly, before some new surge of energy took her. Everyone, I think, knows a shadow of her, but none quite the same. To call her energetic is to call a hurricane windy. She could write a poem, sew a wig, rebuke a passer-by, write a poem rebuking the passer-by whilst slowly tearing the wig to pieces with a thread caught in her sleeve. She stared out at the world through tinted glasses, swept a hand through violently dyed hair, and damn well brought its colourful glory into her life, and _revelled _in every last split second. I very much hope that she does so still, and that we can all do so still.

We met in the autumn of a new age, at the start of University. Back then, you see, I had pretentions of a literary nature, and so found myself on a foggy evening in Freshers' Week crouching through one of the Dickensian holes that are called halls of learning (kennels would be more appropriate) to their society. I arrived, typically, half an hour late, weighed down by too many library books and too few creative juices. This particular sector of kennel was at the top of a steep hill, so I arrived painfully conscious of the sweat stink seeping into my jumper.

In the abandoned classroom the society had taken over for an evening were a number of groups of people, all poring over projects of some kind. I dumped my bag in a corner, and craned over shoulders to see what they were. Paintings, being added to. A regiment of model Highlanders (a battalion of the 51st in 1944, if I wasn't mistaken) being formed into ranks for another splash of khaki. Poetry, being scrawled out en masse by a large, whiskery man with a cane-I glimpsed the rhyme of "lucky" and "unlucky", and hastily moved on. But, after some searching, I found some writers of fiction. They were crowded around a "round robin", and the poor beast seemed to be choking its last.

"Great," said one of the authors as I introduced myself, offering a chair. "Another one of us-"

"One of us…" the knot intoned, and laughed.

"Ready to surf the waves of fiction and imagination. One at a time."

I eyed the piece sceptically; although two paragraphs long, no less than eight protagonists seemed to have introduced themselves, each in different handwriting and with contradictory motives. I eyed my watch. "We have two and a half hours to finish this? Oh, good evening by the way. Sorry I'm late."

"Let the words flow!" someone piped up.

"OK." I rummaged around for my pen, considering matters. Out of the eight protagonists, three appeared to be conducting an incestuous relationship, so they were out if I was to continue one of them. One, a one-legged veteran soldier, looked promising, until I realised he was committing the unforgiveable sin of bearing a katana; philistine I was, I moved on. A teenager in a black greatcoat, listening to something unholy on her I-Pod (my eyes moved from page to author, found her mirror image, and continued on.) There was a vicious hound, always watching them, but yet to spring. There was a bastard clone of Harry Potter-no, now I remember, the hapless writer decided to actually include Harry Potter. Which left...

"Right. Who was doing the Prince of the Fey?"

A girl, managing to write and fix her glasses at the same time, raised her hand.

"I hope I can do her justice."

"Her? Oberon's a most noble man-woman-androgynous being-thing-who would…"

"Yes. I'm used to writing Sharpe fan fiction. I don't get these subtleties, I'm afraid." I finally dragged out the pen (lodged, with the clinical expertise that the inanimate world possesses in ruining my existence, in my thickest history of Prussia), and clicked it into life. "She seems just my type." I smiled a yellow-toothed, ingratiating smile. Now, what would this Prince do? What if he could summon a stag, or…

Well, suffice to say that by the end the girl with the knitting had provided a thousand courses of action Prince Oberon could take. I ignored nine hundred of these, but we ended up making a dogged, bloodied truce and agreeing in the 10% that involved Oberon mounting a stag the colour of homeliness and longing and riding off to help the soldier, the three incestuous princes, Dumbledore's Army and the greatcoated chosen one against Tokugawa Ieyasu's Gaijin Warriors. (The katana writer, it seemed, didn't know his history, as I mentioned quietly to myself.) We'd just got round to agreeing the colour of the armour for the Tokugawa's champion's katana-hair (everyone having ignored my protests about the actual Japanese armies of the period using gunpowder whenever they could-not, it must be said, to my great surprise), when time ran out for our scribblings. We had all enjoyed ourselves immensely.

The girl with the glasses, triumphantly finishing gluing as we went to the pub, took the chance to inform me of the wonders opened up by reading more astonishing and bizarre fantasy fiction. Tales of fairies, and boys brought up by ghosts, and gods in machines. She rattled off a dozen titles-but considered my own suggestions of Patrick O'Brien, and wished she had time to read everything in the wide world. As she did so, she did something I have never seen another do before, and have yet to do since. She danced. Just like that, on the path in front of us as we trudged along behind, book bags shouldered. I have a picture quite clearly in my mind-a tap of some sort. I once remembered its name in full.

It was only when we reached the pub that she introduced herself as Jorrocks. We since continued to write that ridiculous story out over the weeks, neither of us quite knowing what we were doing, but progressing nevertheless as characters came and went like the falling Autumn leaves. Essay deadlines came and went, workloads rose and fell-but that story, at least, remained.

At Christmas, I asked if she would like to visit the family. She declined; skiing holiday. Very busy. But, at least, time to read Patrick O'Brien.

Probably just as well. Revision had to be done.

I told myself that. Believing everyone one says, or reads, is not always for the best.

In Spring, we returned, and both had different ideas on how the story should proceed. Both were incorporated, ultimately-the Prince Oberon and the two surviving incestuous protagonists would form a musical quartet with a former Jesuit, in a manner that made perfect sense at the time- but time pounced on us. Crisp snow turned to the grey of slush and mud. Exams had to be prepared for (at least, in my view they did; Jorrocks was always more cavalier about them. Most people were.) And, with less a bang than a whimper, the Easter holidays drew close.

_But Hound's Gate remained._

It was a cold day in March. We walked to halls, along the edge of the old bicycle factory, jeans-hems scraping into the pavement, eyes fixed on the ground before us.

"Flower down there," she said after a silence.

"What?" I had noticed, typically, none.

"Snowdrop."

"Oh yes. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Oh, bugger."

"Keats. Improving."

"Philistine, I know." I then rattled off the number of cycles made per month in 1935, before the factory was turned to rubble.

"I never knew that! Does the company still run?"

I knew for a fact that, probably, I'd mentioned it before. But best not to intrude. "It makes them in India, I think."

"Oh. A shame! Dad was…"

Not for the managers it wasn't, or their profit margins, but I remember nodding. "Quite."

"And- well- "a sudden change in manner. The weak eyes, behind their lenses, suddenly darted over to mine. "Ah… could you do me a favour? A big one?"

Naturally, as long as you don't blow it on stuff from That Hippy Vegan Place whose name I can't remember. Student Loans were designed for practical things, like Imperial Guardsmen. Now, what-

"No, no, nothing like that. I'm going to be… away for a few days. A few weeks, possibly."

Where?

"Oh-family. Another trip. Cornwall."

"I never knew pasties were your thing."

A friendly punch. "Relatives."

"Right."

"So, would it be possible for you to…"

Well?

"House sit."

Jorrocks, I dimly knew, lived in a house of mostly her own. Not the done thing for all first years, but accommodation was cramped at best. "OK. When?" My own family had no plans. The Relatives from The Mediterranean were coming, with their guts and bibles, so they had to hunker down and pray they were forgotten. "And what sort of thing would it involve?"

Well-not much. It's just she'd hate to think of everything being left alone-all her current housemates were away, you see- and, well, it'd be a doddle. Cheap area, lots of decent restaurants too carnivorous for her to use. She wouldn't be long. She'd owe me one, big time.

And her favour was something which I wanted as much as anything. So, papers were signed, promises made, numbers noted down in a page reluctantly torn from her ever-present writers' notebook. Telephones were used.

So, in the long and the short of it, when the holidays came around and she left with a sweeping "goodbye" text the night before, I was left to dray my meagre belongings up to the house and set up shop.

And everything, after that, changed.


End file.
